Plastic Logic

Just saw some info on this new e-paper product from Plastic Logic.  This is good; a step in the right direction.  It seems like it has been years that people have been talking about e-paper and e-book readers, and there are several out there, but they are pricey and still don't seem to have great usability.  I'm going to keep an eye on this one (still some glitches apparent in the presentation in that company link).  If someone comes up with a good reader, I'll definitely look into buying on.  I do still love the physicalness of a real book, but this looks like a great way to carry around several, and to access other document types as well.

Here's some more video of the device at the DEMO convention earlier this week:

(remember to buy Brian's products from Zazzle!)

Braid

I recently downloaded the game Braid via the Xbox 360 Live Arcade, and just finished up playing through it. I can't say enough good about this game. It is a little indy game by a small team (essentially two guys), and it is very much worth the $15 bucks for it. I'd love to see more creative works like this. It is hard to tell from still photos (which might even look kind of childish and silly), but it is a very beautiful game, with painterly graphics and a fantastic score. It is mainly a platformer (with heavy nods to Super Mario Bros.) but includes the use of time-manipulation to collect puzzle pieces that help you proceed or add to the story.  The story and approach is so refreshing: it is well thought out, it is thought provoking, and it is mature.  I can see how some people might be put off by the ambiguous, arty story, but it is challenging (story wise and many of the puzzles) and you'll be rewarded by well earned a-ha moments (again in the story and from solving the puzzles).  Without spoiling anything, I was at first kind of confused and underwhelmed by a change of style of the last level, but then when I figured out what was going on, it completely floored me and made me appreciate the game much more.

Other recent games (not so thought-provoking):

• Oblivion: Shivering Isles - Fairly recently finished this. If you are looking for a game (an older one) that will give you a ton of hours of play, it is Oblivion.
  
• NCAA Football 2007 - I found this for $5, so I bought it. Oh, Iowa State, why can't you be more powerful?
  
• Soul Calibur IV - Far from thought-provoking or life changing, the Soul Calibur series is still a fun bit of mindless fighting.
  

Jon Stewart on media, fun election merchandise

Well, political season is in full swing again, and that is angrying up my blood so I thought I would try to start posting every once in a while again.

First stop:

• Jon Stewart on Palin's Media Surrogates found on Comedy Central Insider.  I'm really glad that someone pays attention to what these people say over time.  His examples are all Republicans, I believe, but I certainly don't think this kind of two-faced-ness is limited to just that party.  I would love to see a 24-hour media channel that constantly challenges people on their changing positions and hypocrisy, or shows video proof of contradictory stances.

• Otherwise, I've put some hopefully fun political designs on my Zazzle Store.  Please feel free to check them out and buy many, many items. (Using the link in the first sentence of this paragraph gives me a better royalty, by the way, thank you.)
  

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

A lot of fish, bubbles, customer service, monitors, laterals, music

Here's a little link potpourri for you on:

• Plentyoffish: 1-man company might be worth $1 Billion. OK, that's impressive. In the article you find that he recently hired a second person.
• Bubblewrap, now in electronic form! And it is refreshable, so you can pop it over and over.
• The Ultimate Consumerist Guide to Fighting Back. I haven't read through all of it yet, but looks like it might be a good resource for those unfortunate times when you don't get the service you need.
• Make the most of dual monitors. Some neat tips and freebies for those of us with two (or more) monitors.
• I'll close with a couple videos:
• Here was an amazing football clip showing a great (but unusual) use of laterals:
• And this last one... all I can say is brilliant:
• 
  

The electric company

I'm not generally a huge YouTube scavenger, but occasionally I link to it from some other forum or site and get sucked into chasing a nostalgic path. Like today, when I ran across a link to a video from the old "The Electric Company" children's show from my youth (it was "Billy Lick a Lolly"), and that started me browsing for more. I was pretty sure I had watched this show, and now that is confirmed because in seconds of video, or just from the video titles, it all comes back to me. (What a strange and awesome show this was!) Other good ones:

• It really blew my mind
• Steady Freddy
• Whimper and Whine
• Freeze
• T-I-O-N (shun, shun, shun, shun), which is a song I never really forgot, along with
• Eleven Twelve (this one is a bit of a remix) from Sesame Street
• Lost Kid and Yo-Yo Master - another one from those trippy 70s episodes of Sesame Street

Browse around YouTube and you'll find tons more (just be careful about getting the songs stuck in your head).

Five differences

Remember those activities in magazines when you were a kid where you had to look at two pictures and identify the differences in the two? Well, someone used the power of the Internet to make an updated version with nice animations. Five Differences is a neat little time waster.

IT vision, student vision, future vision, bleak vision

Here's a small set of items for today:

• 10 little secrets you should know about working in IT - as an IT person myself, I saw some truth in these, though I thought it was a bit pessimistic.
• A Vision of Students Today (YouTube video) - I thought this was an interesting class project, but I'm not entirely sure the point they were trying to make, if any. I'm guessing it was that classes are too impersonal, but there was a little bit of students-are-slackers-that-don't-pay-attention-or-study in there too.
• The Smartest Futurist on Earth - a short article on Ray Kurzweil (someone most IT geeks have probably heard of already). His vision of the future is fascinating, and I'd like to hear more about the ethical aspects of how these technologies would be applied.
• Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time - This is a good list for fans of this type of movie (like me), but I completely agree with several of the posters that the author is really loosely using the term "dystopian". Many of the movies don't belong on the list.
  

Current and recent inputs: music

I covered books last time, so now here are some recent music purchases:

• James Blunt "All The Lost Souls" - I enjoyed his first big release, and like this second one as well, though I think it lost some of the naivety and simpleness that made the first good. I definitely need to listen more before judgment, but it also has a bit of the "every song sounds the same" syndrome to me.
• Queens of the Stone Age "Era Vulgaris" - I think QOTSA continues to produce solid rock albums that are consistently good and consistently evolving. I never quite know what the style and theme will be, but I'm pleasantly surprised, as I was with this one.
• Linkin Park "Minutes to Midnight" - I used to be a big Linkin Park fan, and I definitely think this is a good CD, but it just doesn't capture my attention like their older albums did. It is definitely a more mature album, and there are some nice touches in style.
• Shiny Toy Guns "We Are Pilots" - This is a fun one; some discotheque beats and synthesizers, with some wailing lyrics and voices. I like the combination of the great male and female lead vocalists.
  

Current and recent inputs: books

Thought I'd go over some recent things I'm reading:

Books:

• The Fourth Bear is the second book in the "Nursery Crimes" series (and I'm currently reading it). It is good literary based humor about a detective agency that investigates crimes by nursery rhyme characters. So far it seems a little more busy and chaotic than its predecessor, The Big Over Easy (about Humpty Dumpty's murder).
• The Surrogates is an interesting graphic novel set 50 years in the future, where most people stay home and conduct their life through a robotic 'avatar' (like Second Life in a physical world). The main plot is a pretty simple detective story, but the book does a good job fleshing out the social and judicial aspects of a Surrogates based world.
• The Futurist is about a popular futurist that "comes clean" about how his work is all a guessing game, and it plunges him into turmoil and adventure. It's definitely not one of the best books I've read, but it provides some thinking material.
• Snow Crash is a classic cyberpunk sci-fi book that introduced a lot of concepts (like avatars, Second Life and The Surrogates owes it for this). While in the virtual world, hackers are getting infected with the Snow Crash virus, turning them into babbling fools or comatose victims. This is a rich and creative vision of the future, and I really enjoyed the out of the box portrayal.
  

Changed the blog template

Changed the look of the blog. A friend pointed out that it was all messed up in Internet Explorer 7.0 (looks like that LibraryThing badge wasn't rendering right), and I noticed other odd spaces show up there in IE and Firefox. So, I decided to just use one of the Blogger templates to keep it easier from now on. Hope you like! I think it is much simpler and clean.

Misery, email comprehension, year 2000, einstein

Hi there! Here's a random variety of things:

• 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable - an article from Cracked.com that has some nice insights and food for thought (and some not suitable for work/rated R language).
• From that article, I also linked over to this one about why emails are so easily misunderstood. Another interesting one that puts a pretty low rate of actually comprehending emails correctly.
• Paleo-Future has another good find with these 1910 French postcards that depicted what life in the year 2000 would be like.
• Check out this amazing speedpainting of Albert Einstein (4 hours condensed to 3.5 minutes).
  

US Americans don't have maps

Ah, America's youth. Here is a fine example in this year's Miss Teen Intellect Contest, er Beauty Pageant...

Miss Teen South Carolina answers "Why do you think a fifth of Americans can't find the US on a world map?"

Now, she was probably very nervous at the moment, but even if you don't have an answer, you can spin this into some practiced speech about education. But hey, at least she is pretty.

Tigers, smoke, and the final countdown

Just a mish-mash again today since my posting is so few and far between...

For you Calvin & Hobbes fans, here's a site where you can find every comic strip in the series in order of publication. Very cool, but I don't know if that site has the rights to it, so it may not last forever.

Frozen smoke will change the world says scientists. An interesting article on something that sounds straight out of science fiction.

And I'll end things with another goofy YouTube video. This one is of the worst "Final Countdown" rendition ever; even worse than the one by band Europe (I kid; I actually used to really like that song).

News bloopers, boomshine

I ran across this Yahoo! article today about TV anchor mishaps caught on video. The article has many links to YouTube videos of said goofs caught on tape. I didn't watch all (or most) of them, but the couple I did were funny.

Before I link to some examples, I've also been playing this simple, little web game called BoomShine. Easy to learn (and really the whole game wasn't that difficult) but fun.

On to a couple news videos, and I don't know if they really count since they are University news channels. The first is an old favorite (Boom Goes the Dynamite!):



This other one is very similar; a painful awkwardness. I hadn't seen this one before today (Bad Weatherman):

Doh, simpsonize yourself

In another use of picture face recognition, you can use the Simpsonizer to create a Simpsons character version of yourself. However, I'm not sure it even uses any of the photo recognition, as the first attempt looked nothing like me at all. I had to customize the heck out of it to get remotely close.
Here's what I ended up like:


The site was pretty buggy, and took many attempts for the page to even load, so the other alternative is to build your character from scratch at the Simpsons Movie website. Here's what my total-from-scratch Brian looked like:

The end all pizza

I saw this monstrous beast of a pizza from a post on Plastic Bamboo. It is the "Double Roll" from Pizza Hut Japan (check out their website menu here; it shows a lot of other wonderful creations).

According to one poster on the Plastic Bamboo comments, the translation says the ingredients are:
the bacon-weiner/cheese-stuffed crust, hamburgers, edamame, corn, red pepper, Italian sausage, ham, bacon, bacon bits, sliced mushrooms, onions, green pepper, garlic chips, basil, and black pepper. It also includes maple syrup to drizzle on the cheese crust.
The page also apparently says "Recommended for children"!

Now that's a pizza!

My celebrity look-alikes

Hello! I haven't had much interest in blogging much lately, but I'll still try to throw a little something up here every once in a while.

For instance, here is my "MyHeritage.com Celebrity Look-Alikes". I've done this a few times with different pictures, and I get all different celebrities, so I'm not sure how good it is.

Facts, exams, polls on positions

Hello! Spring is here! Mowed the lawn for the first time today. It is always a great feeling, until I realize "Wait, now I have to do this once a week or more!".

Some links:

• 301 Useless Facts. While many are useless, a lot of them are interesting.
• Comparison of a Chinese high school test question with a British college one. Ah, it's just math. You'll never need to use that again... In reality, I find this disturbing. (Not that the Chinese are educating their kids well, but that the British and Americans are letting education slide.)
• This political poll states that three quarters of Americans like leaders that will compromise, and two thirds of Americans like leaders that stick to their positions, even if unpopular. I very firmly believe in this and will stand strong on it, but I'm willing to change my mind.

Monkey business, plumber problems, future visions

Hello there. Here are some stories for you to review:

• That whole hundred monkeys on a hundred typewriters thing? Probably not likely to produce the works of Shakespeare.
• Rookie plumber burns down $12 million mansion on his first day. Now that is sure to affect his performance review.
• AT&T "Visions of the Future" videos from 1993 (see links to parts 1 through 6 below). I actually remember seeing this way back when and thinking it was cool. Now I just mourn that it hasn't materialized or I dread that fashion and hair style will revert in the near future when this tech is available.

Super computers, double standard, double image, kong

Hello! After last week's blizzard, it is starting to actually get nice again here in whitmarshall. Crazy weather this spring. So whether you are huddled in to stay warm, or indoors escaping the heat, here are some links for you:

• Something only the geeks like me will appreciate: Things computers can do in movies.
• With Don Imus gone, critics turn towards rap. I saw another blog post where the author went through the Billboard Hip Hop top ten and found all kinds of examples much worse than what Imus said. I hope this criticism continues, because we've had a double standard for too long. I know rap supporters say that the language reflects the tough life and childhood of the performers, but allowing it in song just spreads that attitude instead of combatting it.
• Hybrid images may possibly creep you out. They are images that change as you distance yourself from the picture. I didn't have a lot of luck backing up to see the changes, but it worked OK if I took my glasses off.
  
• Some Post-It happy fellows at USCS created a work of Donkey Kong art on one of the campus buildings. Go Mario!